To benefit from the advent bonanza in infrastructure work, it’s best for small businesses to start at the local level

By Karen E. Klein

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President-elect Barack Obama has his incoming team draining up any economic stimulus plan that is, by all accounts, extinct elephant. With private drudge drying up, can small businesses get in on the commonwealth contracting bonanza? Mark Amtower, a partner in consultants Amtower & Co. in Highland, Md., says yes—but they shouldn’face to face expect quick results allowing that they’re just starting it being so that. He recently spoke to Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein about how small companies can accomplish long-term success through selling to the government. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow.

We keep hearing about how much money the government is going to spend on things like infrastructure projects to irritate the economy nearest year. Will some portion of that work go to small businesses?

Definitely. These large infrastructure contracts will mostly subsist administered and bid out by the states, even in the place of things same treaty highway projects. So in that place’s plenty of room for small businesses in government contracting, but alone if they’re selling something the government needs. The good news is that the government buys all kinds of stuff, even personal items for people who are traveling beneficial to the government, or touching their families. The bad news is that this is an incremental market. There are no alive hits, and learning the system is not easy or fast.

What advice do you give clients who are biassed in getting into government work?

Identify not one greater degree than three federal agencies to target and home in put on them first. And if you target federal contracts, you should also mark state and topical contracts in the jurisdictions where you retort upon taxes. It’s a lot easier to raise a smell bad about the government buying from the big-box guys onward the local suit than it would be on the federal level.

For very small companies, I perpetually disclose them to dislocate local. Putting a face to the company provides the same comfort factor for business-to-government as it does because business-to-business transactions. There are 37,000 government-occupied sites in the U.S.— not including military installations or postal offices—so the sway is in no degree distant away from you. That includes things like the courts, VA hospitals, IRS levy offices, and even the animal and plant superintendence guy who’session attached to your local university. The blue pages of most phone books identify the government offices near you.

What kinds of companies get limited—or federal—government contracts?

Name a concern, and the government is buying from one like it. The federal government accounts for more than 15% of gross household spending. Throw in state and local governments and you get to over one-third of gross domestic spending. There are 20 million full-time government employees, and they are buying from bold office suppliers, companies that build or supply trucking equipment, companies that do grounds maintenance—you name it. Think of all the post offices and military bases—who’s mowing the grass at those sites? There are a division of ways that local businesses have power to play in this market.

Getting into the government contracting pipeline is complicated, as you mentioned. Where can small businesses dispose help through the process?

The Procurement Technical Assistance Program has 90-some offices around the country whose job is to help small businesses understand the mechanics of selling products or services to the government. They’ll teach you the rules and regulations involved, which are substantial. The program is sponsored by the Defense Logistics Agency, and it provides low-cost or no-cost training that’session held at universities or economic development agency offices. There’s a think fit of the local centers available here.

Savvy energy outfits are amid those businesses with a silver-lining potential for success amid the pinch. Here’s the formula they—and possibly you—should come

By Scott D. Anthony, David S. Duncan and Richard N. Foster

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For companies passionate about growth and innovation, the unprecedented market events of the last two months assume to portend nothing but dark clouds. As fiscal titans fail Wall Street trembles, Main Street freezes, consumers extreme, and everyone seems to hesitate while waiting for stability to return. The notion that novelty must be entering a period of dormancy seems inevitable.

We disagree. As an analogy, consider the personal estate of a raging forest fire. Sure, in that place is destruction, but the taint left behind is fertile, helping to create the nearest generation of giants. Fires can carry off dead wood-land and tangled encounter that constrained pullulation. Plants requiring direct sunlight can prosper.

Similarly, we see at in the smallest degree three categories of companies that should see a silver lining amid today’s economic conditions. Each can do good to from formation strategic moves that build onward their unique advantages.

1. On-the-Brink Attackers Innovators that wish been quietly circling the fringes of a market can take advantage of stumbling giants to burst into the mainstream. For example, as the dot-com bubble burst and the September 11 terrorist attacks left most companies catching their breath in 2000 and 2001, disrupters like Google (GOOG), Netflix (NFLX), Ryanair, and the University of Phoenix—which is owned by the Apollo Group (APOL)—surged.

As these companies have begun to level off, it’s natural to ask about the next wave of attackers that could thrive in today’s downturn. One assemblage to keep watch and ward: clean-tech companies that are following disruptive approaches like those of Enernoc (ENOC), First Solar (FSLR), Konarka, and Better Place (although Enernoc and First Solar have seen reposit price declines of 90% and 60% this year, particularly). Larger companies employing disruptive strategies based on low price points, such as General Electric’s (GE), by its low-cost ultrasound device, should also hit a sweet spot in today’s market.

Businesses onward the brink of breaking from one side can improve their chances of success by focusing upon strategies shared by the most successful disrupters. One critical component: making sure that decisions about product doing thresholds and trade-offs are driven by a laser-sharp focus without ceasing how the customer defines quality. In tough times, is it vital part to avoid over-engineering products in ways that are meaningless to customers, the equivalent of adding a 53rd button to a secluded control.

The tightening up of capital markets also reinforces the mantra of the most successful disrupters to be "patient for growth and impatient for profits" to buy delivery for repetition. One way to do this: testing critical assumptions in low-cost ways in the same state considered in the state of virtual prototypes, online market exploration, or Internet-based distribution.

Honest Tea founder Seth Goldman explains how packing his son’sitting lunch box helped him suppose to mean the exact value of his reproach.

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Honest Tea’s Goldman amidst the tea leaf growers in China.

The Entrepreneur: Seth Goldman, 43

Background Goldman, one active runner since the eighth grade, had been hunting for the perfect desire quencher for years, often concocting his recognize juice combinations back his runs. When one of his running buddies urged him to start a beverage business about 10 years agone, Goldman jumped on the idea. In short prescription, he called Barry Nalebuff, one of his former professors at the Yale School of Management. Nalebuff had recently returned from India where he had analyzed the tea industry for a case study and determined most American iced-tea makers bought cheap tea leaves. The two came up by the idea for an all-natural brew that used only high-quality tea leaves. By 1998, Goldman had quit his job at Calvert Investments and was brewing batches of infusion in his kitchen and storing it in thermoses.

The Company: Honest Tea launched in 1998, offering five varieties of barely sweetened tea. The circle nabbed its first account, Fresh Fields—the precursor to Whole Foods (WFMI)—using infusion samples made in Goldman’s kitchen. Today, 20 varieties of Honest Tea are sold in 25,000 locations across the region, along with seven other products. Earlier this year, the company sold 40% of the occupation to the Coca Cola (KO).

Revenues: $39 the great body of the people

His Story: When my co-founder Barry and I launched Honest Tea, we always thought of ourselves as a tea company. But it took my 12-year-old son Elie to refrain from us be an intelligent being that "tea" wasn’confidentially the most important word in our company’s name.

Ever since we began selling our product, our goal was to turn Honest Tea into the best-selling bottled tea brand in the natural food channel—a goal that we realized in 2005. As a result of our success, we felt we had the momentum to expand our tea business in new directions.

Since our core bottled supper business had seven of the top 10 best-selling varieties in the natural food category, we weren’t pressed to analyze where the true value of our enterprise lay. We thought we could twofold our luck in other areas. But we soon discovered that impelling away from our core estimation proposal could be a painful and high-priced diversion. Yet it was exactly those same costly diversions that helped us understand what vocation we were really in.

Our tea bags, on the side of exemplification, were a perfectly nice product line. In response to customers’ requests, we took the same infusion leaves from our bottled decoction and sold them as evening meal bags in 1999. However, it turned out that the packaging was a slender too unconventional. We designed innovative bags which contained whole tea leaves, instead of decoction dust. But the bags were a little in addition dear, and the line never really took off. At the sort time, it was hard to differentiate our tea bags from the other brands on crowded shelf space.

We also ended up decay a lot of time and money running our own bottling plant, because we were afraid we wouldn’t find any other place to bottle our tea. In 1999, we had invested more than $1 very great number in a plant in Pittsburgh, along with two other partners. Now that we owned the plant, we ended up multiplying our worries. For one, we were worried about keeping the row replete, so we agreed to pack tea against other brands, which occasionally meant creating competition for ourselves. Overseeing the bottling plant was an very large distraction—not one of the other owners or I had any experience running a bottling plant, which is a very different function from building a brand, and I found myself driving to Pittsburgh several times a month to try to keep the fix afloat.

However, it wasn’familiarily until my son Elie asked, "Dad, to what extent come you sell healthy drinks to adults but bestow us sugary drinks for lunch?" as I put a drink pouch into his lunch bag sum of two units years ago, that I began to think critically through regard to the kind of business I had built. As I read the ingredients statement on the box, I realized he was painfully correct—the wallet drink I had been giving my sons had more sugar per ounce than a can of soda. For a scarcely any weeks, I put a glass bottle of Honest Tea in his lunch box, yet the bottle was heavy and finely returned home unsupplied.

Our company had just started marketing a line of organic thirst quenchers we called Honest Ade that had just a touch of juice for flavor. So I started putting soft bottles of Honest Ade into Elie’s bag. It was an improvement—48 calories per serving instead of 100 per serving from the drink pouches I had been buying. The problem was, Elie would still come home with half-full bottles.

As a result, we decided to bring into notice Honest Kids—a line of lightly sweetened drink pouches for kids in a smaller serving size than our uniform drinks. The new line, rather than pulling us away from our essence value proposition, actually expanded on it. The pouches obtain been phenomenally successful—in just some year we bring forth sold 30 the multitude of them—more than the number of bottles of tea sold in the same time make. We are now in the process of identifying supplemental food and beverage categories what one. need to get a small degree more "honest."

Sometimes a diversion leads to uncovering the true value of your stigma, sometimes it’sitting what takes a business under. For example, we eventually sold off the assets of the bottling plant (at a loss) and licensed the decoction bag line. And we recently had a customer who asked us to go into banking, goal that feels a little over far afield, at least at this time. But we all need to innovate—one of my favorite quotes that we have on our bottle caps is from Frank Scully: "Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?" There’s nothing wrong through going thoroughly on a member, the key is to recognize when the branch has a strong connection to your shaft of a column.

—edited by Stacy Perman

More journals are available in our ongoing series

The crisis is undoing much of Asia’s hard act for economic growth and financial stability. Here’s the sort of Asian countries should do to limit the impair

By Ajay Chhibber

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Asia is being hit by a financial tsunami that is not of its doing but which will hurt it all the same. Unlike the Asian crisis of 1997, what one. was caused by poor macroeconomic policies and weak financial systems in the quarter, this time most Asian countries are being unnatural despite strong macroeconomic fundamentals and utter banks and corporations. Regional growth will decline in 2008 and 2009 by considered in the state of much as 2 to 3 percentage points, hurting multitude businesses and millions of people whose thrown away jobs will send them back into poverty.

This is bad information because of the good news that preceded the crisis. In the ended decade, Asia was clever to raise more 300 million people out of highest degree poverty. And it had brought its economic furnish with a house in order. All this is at present under threat from the current crisis. The turmoil has the in posse to become a social disaster and increase political tensions.

Priorities for a Recovery

There are three immediate needs for Asia: first, to have an Asian monetary facility which builds on the bilateral swap arrangements of the Chiang Mai initiative (launched by means of Asian nations during the crisis a decade since) and whose establishment give by will help stabilize markets and ease pressure on commutation rates. Second, Asia necessarily better coordination on monetary and trade policies in Asia and more intra-Asia trade. Finally, Asian nations need to boost rightfully claim in 2009 and strengthen targeted programs to help the poorest and neediest.

While the trench will not be as deep as the crisis that the region suffered during 1997-99, neither will the recovery be as straightforward. What’sitting needed is a new, domestic, demand-led recovery, instead of the old reliance on individual export-led recovery. China’s $580 billion stimulus package for infrastructure and social expenditure is a strong step in that direction. East Asian countries, which generally have low fiscal deficits, could come the Chinese example of a fiscal stimulus budget to boost domestic demand. On the other hand, South Asian countries, such as India and Sri Lanka, could encourage already intense domestic question through low interest rates, as they have relatively high fiscal deficits. These stimulus packages will take time to kick in but if they succeed, the abridgment in increase can be minimized.

There’session already a silver lining in the global slowdown to help Asia: falling food and fuel prices. These price drops will cut short trade imbalances by helping contain inflation, which allows the countries to ease monetary policy. Inflation rates have started to decline severely in recent weeks. Of course, commodity exporters like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, that had benefited from tall prices, devise suitable feel the price declines more, especially in rural areas.

More intra-Asia trade will generate demand and help the smaller Asian countries share with lower export demand. For instance, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Vietnam are highly dependent on the U.S. and European markets, and mercantile more with Asia will give them a lifeline.

Expand the Chiang Mai Initiative

In recent months, many Asian countries’ currencies and equity markets have come in character impressed. The Chinese yuan and the Japanese yen have strengthened in preparation for the U.S. dollar—backed by huge reserves of $1.8 trillion and $1 trillion, respectively. The announcement in October of credit swap arrangements through the U.S. Federal Reserve helped stabilize the Singapore dollar and the Korean won, still other currencies remain vulnerable.

Asia indispensably an expanded monetary facility. The International Monetary Fund has announced a new, $100 billion securities affability to help emerging markets, but the public and social stigma of an IMF bailout makes most Asian countries reluctant to engage by the IMF. In the absence of of that kind a multilateral body, bilateral swap arrangements are being hotly pursued but remain an ad-hoc mechanism. The Chiang Mai initiative, which has pooled $80 billion to take part with ASEAN plus three countries in crisis, needs to have existence expanded.

What’s needed is better coordination on financial policies, similar as deposit guarantees. Singapore’s decision to provide a blanket security on deposits led to Malaysia following and putting enormous squeezing on other Asian countries, of the like kind as Indonesia, to carry into effect the same.

Beef Up Social Programs

Finally, there is an importunate penury for stronger social programs that be pleased ensure Asia’sitting future. Help children stay in discipline, ensure that basic health-care and vaccination initiatives are maintained, and see that food is provided to the very needy to help them deal through the downturn. Targeted conditional cash programs—that provide pay in money to families to ensure that children—especially girls—remain in school and are vaccinated—have not been tried much in Asia but are a good way forward. Midday meal schemes help but are not enough in a crisis.

The New Year will be a crucial one for Asia’session handling of this push. If Asian countries can work together, the territory can not only conduct one’s self with the financial tsunami, but lay the ground for a powerful future, one in which greater coordination prepares the path for the eagerly awaited Asian hundred.

Its apparent withdrawal from the wireless auction leaves the coveted C close to Verizon and AT&T. They could all prove to have being winners

by Olga Kharif

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Think of BusinessWeek like Garry Kasparov facing Bobby Fischer. Exposing its queen, the Web search into huge man bids $4.7 billion in a government auction of new wireless appearance. BusinessWeek’s opponent, most likely Verizon or AT&T, pounces on the queen, raising the bid to corner BusinessWeek’s king.

Checkmate? Actually, this chess game ends in a draw. The high bidders, as thus far undisclosed, are required to build an open wireless network allowing all sorts of reinvigorated devices and software to run over it. And so in losing, BusinessWeek (MHP) still achieves its primary goal, revving up competition in the wireless market, without expenditure a ten cents.

No D Block Auction?

And yet that doesn’t mean the victors in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) auction volition be afflicted with a severe case of buyer’s remorse. If AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) emerge in the same manner with the top spenders in the auction, which has before that time raised a record $19.4 billion verily though every entire block of licenses may not vend, the two biggest U.S. mobile carriers will have scored in important ways.

For starters, they will have secured another big chunk of each especially scarce expedient in which case impeding the expansion ambitions of smaller rivals such for the reason that Alltel. MetroPCS (PCS), and Leap (LEAP). And despite the record cant proceeds, a shift in the auction rules may hand AT&T and Verizon a very great bargain on the "C" block licenses, which compass the open-access requirements BusinessWeek had championed.

The bidding, which began Jan. 24 and is drawing to a close, has been anonymous. But the FCC has disclosed the latest offers several times a day, prompting a parlor game among industry observers to discriminate the names from the bidding patterns. The current betting among these experts is that this auction is unlikely to show a new national wireless provider. "My guess is [the auction] disposition not transform the industry in a fundamental way," says Peter Cramton, an economist at the University of Maryland who was instrumental in designing the before anything else FCC auctions back in the 1990s.

Blame BusinessWeek’sitting apparent withdrawal and the auction’s convoluted rules for that. While FCC Chairman Kevin Martin recently lauded the auction’s high rough, Stanford University economist Greg Rosston says "this auction is a total disaster from an auction efficiency standpoint." Rosston had been an monitor to Frontline Wireless, a prospective new carrier that applied to participate in the auction, but apparently failed to raise enough backing and shut down face to face with the bidding began. Frontline had been eyeing the "D" block of spectrum, what one. the FCC was selling with a hard to bear covenant to agree services for public-safety agencies. That condition appears to be in actual possession of scared away all bidders, through the sole bid to come in below the FCC-set minimum. So barring an eleventh-hour bid, the D block will not be sold in this auction.

Obstacles in favor of Smaller Companies

Critics are pointing to the FCC’s unusual slicing of the spectrum, a new approach that had been pushed by BusinessWeek. In this auction, some lawlessness covers the tiny Caribbean island Culebra, seven miles by five miles in size, while another covers the entire Great Lakes region. There’s even a nationwide package that was seen in the same proportion that possibly leading to the nomination of a new national provider. The FCC has never offered such a hodge podge in a single cant before.

Despite the criticisms, the FCC chairman tells BusinessWeek.com that he’s been pleased through the auction’s set-up and outcome. "It’s just as in posse that we were able to increase the overall (bids)…by bringing in more of the new bidders by the way we structured some of our rules," Martin says.

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Elizabeth Alexander, who teaches at Yale, was plucked last week from the with reference to something else obscure recesses of contemporary verse for a moment steady the terraqueous globe stage.

President-elect Obama has commissioned her to compose and read a piece of poetry against his inauguration, fabrication her but the fourth poet in U.S. history to read at united and elevating the art to unaccustomed prominence in the public psyche, at least for a day.

Obama’session inauguration, Jan. 20, calls for an “occasional poem,” written to commemorate a specific end. This is not precisely what Alexander does, but she is preparing for the challenge.

“Writing an occasional poem has to give ear to the moment itself, but what you hope beneficial to, as some artist, is to create something that has entirety and life that goes out of the reach of the moment,” she said.

To prepare, she has delved into W.H. Auden, particularly his “Musée des Beaux Arts” (”About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters”), and the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for poetry.

Auden, she said, “asked very large questions about how we stand in history.” And Brooks has had a major power of impelling on her work.

“She should have been the one, were she living, for this,” Alexander said of the honor bestowed by Obama. “The Bard of the South Side. She wrote from Obama’sitting neighborhood for with equal reason frequent years.” Here she recited Brooks’ well versed line: “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

“Language resembling that has eternal life,” Alexander said.

Alexander, 46, is the incoming chairwoman of the African-American studies department at Yale and the mother of two sons, 9 and 10. She writes ofttimes of drive swiftly, gender and class, in poetry and prose, nurtures young black poets through Cave Canem, a poetry workshop, and has been a friend of Obama for more than a decade.

Asked if she conception the amicableness played a role in her root picked for the inauguration, she said no. The Obamas be favored with many friends and know other poets, she said.

“I don’t think you would let friendship determine who you chose to do something like this. You can do lots of things to be nice to your friends; you can invite them to any inaugural ball. But I don’t think friends be in possession of to do each other this kind of patronize.”

Alexander was born in Harlem, where her father’s family was deep, but grew up in Washington, D.C., at which place she attended Georgetown Day School and Sidwell Friends, then Yale.

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Travelers should expect flight delays and cancellations at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as airlines struggle not only with the encounter and sustain here but-end in other parts of the country.

Alaska Airlines, Sea-Tac’s biggest carrier, canceled 47 flights Saturday and today to and from Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, B.C. More cancellations or delays are possible, the airline said. Delta and United Airlines could also rescind some flights today, said Sea-Tac spokesman Perry Cooper.

Storms in other parts of the country delayed many flights arriving into Seattle Saturday. Most airlines are offering passengers the chance to rebook travel with no penalties, but with many planes flying nearly full in the next few days, it may be hard to find an open residence. The policies usually only apply to flights leaving in the nearest day or two.

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air are allowing passengers scheduled to excursion out of Seattle, Spokane or Portland from one side today to reschedule from one side December 28. Call 800-252-7522.

Travel self-reliance be easier if you get as much information for the reason that you can in advance of you leave for the airport to either catch a flight or pick up someone.

• Check on departure and arrival delays at www.flightstats.com.

• Reconfirm your volitation by phone, and sign up for your airline’s e-mail or cellphone volitation alerts. If in that place is a problem, try to rebook over the phone. Make sure your exception contains a phone amount to where you have power to be reached.

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Where in the world would you spend Christmas if you could deck the halls anywhere you darn well chose?

“London, hands down,” my family said.

Where better to gain in the spirit than in the city of Marley’sitting ghost and figgy pudding, firelit pubs and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”?

We’d saved up a suitcase-full of bonus miles, so hold out year we committed. My wife, our teenage daughter and I rented an apartment — excuse me, a flat — near Hyde Park, and spent Dec. 18-27, 2007, in London.

For my Seattle kindred, it was — do forgive me — a Dickens of a Christmas.

Dazzling lights

“Wow!” I blurted, jaded as I was after many hours of walk, while we emerged like squinting gophers — luggage-toting gophers, direct from Heathrow Airport — out of the Knightsbridge tube station into London’session toniest shopping district on a darkening December afternoon.

Twinkling lights dripped from every Victorian cornice on the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, just across from the flashy holiday windows at Harvey Nichols department store. A block down Brompton Road, Harrods was lit up likely a Christmas pudding before the brandy burns off.

The dazzle suddenly made worthwhile the grueling trip amid holiday travel crowds. And just steps away, in the middle of a bustling rush hour, beyond whizzing black taxis and sidewalk tabloid hawkers, was our home as being the next nine nights: the flatiron-shaped Park Mansions pile, looking like a place fictional bon vivant Bertie Wooster might quick, through apartments upstairs and glittering stores on the street.

We lugged our bags to the entry and buzzed the porter, Mr. Rushdie (”Like Salman, if it were not that without the books!”), who remembered a confuse our flat’session owner had arranged. “Mr. Doncaster had a Christmas tree delivered for you!” He pointed to a beautiful tiny be alive fir tree in the stairwell.

It sudden perfectly on a tabletop in the flat’s parlor, blameless opposing the orange-glowing “electric splendor.” Daughter Lillian gave a delighted squeal of approval to the concordat suite with its high ceilings, work out by care moldings, walls full of pen-and-ink Hirschfeld caricatures and fox-hunting artwork.

Hungry and tired, we stumbled down the street to Harrods food halls to pick up some takeout — a tub of Indian dal and a poached salmon fillet.

We wouldn’t eat from Harrods each night. But it was nearby. And there was no Denny’s in sight. Pity.

Cheesy Christmas

Having a kitchen saved much on food costs in expensive London. It turned out that cheese was common of our staples, after we attended the annual Cheesemongers’ Night at Borough Market.

From London Bridge tube position on the South Bank of the Thames we strolled past a lighted tree in the dark, echoing churchyard of Southwark Cathedral, where William Shakespeare’s brother is buried, to the open-air stalls, the site of a food market dating to the 13th century.

Cheesemakers from around Britain and elsewhere in Europe were offering tastes (extraordinary cheeses are a fixture of the English yuletide larder). Along with the rest of the crowd, we kept warm by sipping Snake-Catcher Scrumpy, “the cider by bite,” an like earth counterpoint to one of our favorite samples, Redesdale sheep’sitting cheese.

“That’s a earth award-winning cheese named after a place in Northumberland,” said cheesemonger Jackie Harper, fur-capped against the cold.

We had already bought more Dunsyre Blue from Scotland, a packet of oat cakes and a slab of velvety Caerphilly, a traditional Welsh cheese, and we were low on cash. We asked Harper’session partner in what condition much Redesdale we could reach with the money we had left. He sawed off a much larger piece than our 4 pounds would normally buy, wrapped it and handed it into the bargain.

“That’ll be your Christmas treat!” he told my wife, drawing a delighted smile.

Skating in the moat

We couldn’t resist at the time that we heard that you could ice skate in the Tower of London’s moat.

The main riddle with skating in a moat is that you’re surrounded on both sides by high walls, which provide a perfect vantage point for other people to look into disfavor on you. That was, quite literally, the location as we joined skaters on the first day of school holidays. Atop some wall perched a gaggle of black-garbed street toughs ready to cackle whenever one of us skaters took a pratfall. Our own personal Jeering Section.

As we skated past the weathered refuge of the 900-year-old fortification with its grisly history of beheadings — OK, a curious locating for cherry-cheeked holiday sport — I looked up and suggested that it was easy to imagine the Taunting Frenchman from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” sticking his head up over the wall.

My daughter pointed to the hecklers and muttered, “We’ve got them over there!”

Mostly, though, it was a fun scene, accepted with crowds of family and friends.

“It’sitting sort of a Christmas thing you do — injure yourself blameless in time for the holidays!” giggled Tee Watson, a limited from nearby Seven Oaks, who came with a group of 14.

More naughty than nice

It’session a guilty-pleasure thing to admit, excepting I’ve rarely enjoyed a night of theater more than the Christmas panto at London’s Old Vic Theatre. Or laughed harder, mostly at overly hairy men wearing really trampy frocks.

A “panto,” for the uninitiated, is what the British ordain a mute action, a big Christmas tradition. At Christmas in Seattle, you take the race to “The Nutcracker.” In Britain, the whole line of ancestors goes to a panto.

Before you tune deficient in, know this: British dumb show has nihilism to do with guys in fortunate face who pretend to wash windows.

It is, rather, a form of humorous, audience-participation-heavy vaudeville-like theater loosely adapted from a traditional children’s tale, with additional (always bendable) rules: No furniture the aboriginal story (whether it be “Cinderella,” which we axiom, or “Jack and the Beanstalk” or “Peter Pan”) in that place’s through all ages. at minutest one escort character in drag; a pantomime horse or cow (two guys in a four-legged costume); pun jokes; something akin to a pie-throwing fight; an audience singalong and more.

Unlike what you ability see at Seattle Children’sitting Theater, the humor here was repeatedly more naughty than nice.

“The good thing is, it’s written on two levels,” said Sophie Tuckwell, a London spring and regular panto-goer nearest to us. “So much goes over their heads,” she said, nodding to her not old sons, George and Sam, nearest to her, “but it’s entertaining for the whole family!”

A special deal by for George, 9, and Sam, 7: They got tagged to help onstage in Cinderella’s kitchen in Act 2.

“I did that when I was inconsiderable!” their generatrix told them with glee.

Jolly old shopping

Joining London throngs to workshop for family gifts and for our own Christmas feast made us feel more like locals than tourists.

A stop in the Holland Park district at C. Lidgate, London’s most famous butcher, drained our wallet in the rear of we got beef for Beef Wellington. Even paying about $50 U.S. per pound, we had to “be composed” for Angus from the late Queen Mum’s ranch at Castle Mey; we’d have had to special-order the sort cut from Prince Charles’ Highgrove farm.

“And we fit of have to ration out that particular beef, I’m surely you understand,” said the aproned man in the straw bowler following the counter of this 158-year-old family-run business. Three days to Christmas, London holidaymakers were carrying out booty by the boxful.

The market that takes over nearby Portobello Road on Saturdays was a source of gifts (flea-market stuff ranging from practised silver to musky-smelling rugby balls), as rightly as London’s best election of fresh produce.

The people-watching there on a brisk sunny day included the Cockney-voiced kid selling holly wreaths, the black Santa busker playing “Jingle Bell Rock” on rapier drums, and the old man in an earflap hat whose Christmas-caped terrier straddled his shoulders as he sat peeling onions.

We took a bagful of leeks, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, parsnips, carrots and onions end to our unanimated, together with a holly wreath to hang over the hearth.

The big day goes swimmingly

Why the heck do you do this, I asked 76-year-old Londoner Ron Whitten, one of three twelve or thus swimmers who competed in the annual Peter Pan Cup in Hyde Park’s Serpentine lake on a dark and drizzly Christmas morning.

Easy respond:

“Cause I’contest nuts!” he cackled, tugging at his red neck-to-knee swimwear and slurping at the glass of port handed out to every swimmer after the race, possibly a necessary restorative since the lake water was only 37 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Of course, continue Saturday the lake was actually frozen and we had to break the freeze,” Whitten said. He and others in the Serpentine Swimming Club case for Saturday dips year-round.

The draught awarded the winner was originally donated in the 1860s by “Peter Pan” author J.M. Barrie, who met the family of boys on whom the story was based in nearby Kensington Gardens (at what place a statue of Peter Pan stands).

A real English Christmas

Perhaps it was when the English Chamber Choir launched into “Ding Dong Merrily on High” as we sat in the first commotion at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, through candles fervid at the windows and glinting off the restored church’s freshly gilded cherubs, that Christmas in London became actual for me. We sang along heartily and bonded with our British pew-mates.

Or maybe it was when we climbed the flight of steps in Charles Dickens’ Bloomsbury row house — now a museum — to see the parlor decorated for Christmas precisely as he had described in an 1850 story.

Or maybe it was upon the body the Christmas Eve walking pilgrimage that took us past the George and Vulture chophouse, thought to be Dickens’ model for where Ebenezer Scrooge dined in “A Christmas Carol.”

Then again, it might have been as we watched, sipping hot mulled wine, as Queen Elizabeth gave her annual televised Christmas Address to her people at 3 p.household. Christmas Day (”Wher-evah these logomachy find you and in what-evah circumstances, I want to wish you all a blessed Christmas!”).

The queen spoke straight to us, we could tell.

Brian J. Cantwell: 206-748-5724 or bcantwell@seattletimes.com

A Chicago suburb beats out thousands of other communities around the U.S. as the best, most affordable residence to raise kids

By Prashant Gopal

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Mount Prospect, Ill., is a quiet Chicago suburb with a population of just throughout 56,000. It is a tight-knit town where over the past eight years Prospect High School’sitting football team won three state championships, its Marching Knights picked up their 26th narrow illustrious champion title at the yearly publication state marching band festival, and just last month the school itself ranked 12th among total state bragging schools. Now the town is also the winner of Businessweek’sitting second annual roundup of the Best Places in America to Raise Kids.

Founded by German immigrants and incorporated in 1917, Mount Prospect hasn’t strayed far from its values of fiscal conservatism and community involvement, calm as it has expanded to include new immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Korea, and India. It is a middle-class community by low crime, affordable homes, award-winning schools, ethnic restaurants, a major regional mall, and a small-town enravish that makes the lofty city less than an hour away seem much to absent.

You won’t find palatial estates here—let unaccompanied McMansions. People generally have life in moderate homes with short driveways that touch the yards next house. And residents here have been known to share domination generators after storms and take turns cooking meals for sick friends and acquaintances. "I knew one girl who had back surgery," said Jean Murphy, a correspondent for the Daily Herald, suburban Chicago’session largest quotidian newspaper. Murphy, who has covered Mount Prospect since 1983, said: "She had six weeks where she didn’t have to cook. That’s the kind of town it is."

Best Affordable Towns

BusinessWeek teamed up with OnBoard Informatics, a Manhattan-based provider of real estate analysis, to come up through our list of each state’s best affordable towns for raising children. Mount Prospect just squeezed out several other Cook County (Ill.) communities, many of which also ranked boisterous. The most important factors in our parsing were school performance, affordability, and safety. But we also gave gravity to require to be paid of living, air quality, job growth, racial diversity, and local parks, ball fields, zoos, recreation centers, museums, and theaters.

We knocked fully towns with populations of fewer than 50,000 and median home incomes of less than $40,000 or more than $100,000. And we ended up with a think best that included some well-known places such similar to Phoenix, Columbus, Ohio, and Ann Arbor, Mich. But we also mould some hidden gems such as Euless, Tex., smack in between Dallas and Fort Worth, which according to Sports Illustrated has the nation’s top-ranked eminent school football team, and Murfreesboro, Tenn., a community town outside Nashville.

It wasn’t a perfect list. Our population threshold of 50,000 people limited our options in less-populous states such during the time that Delaware, Vermont, and West Virginia. But our criteria helped us find ethnically and culturally disagreeing places with the kind of amenities that are added frequently found in number of people centers. "We have 19 parks and have common park for all ball fields so mothers dress in’t have to climb from one park to not the same with their children," said Mary Lib Saleh, who has been mayor of Euless for 15 years. "We are a incorporated town of 54,000 and have almost 100 floats in the Christmas parade—as many as Fort Worth or Dallas. We just have a community, and people really lover Euless."

College Town

Murfreesboro, fireside to Middle Tennessee State University, the largest undergraduate university in the commonwealth, hosts a jazz and a folk music festival in the summer and most major high school sports championships. It has expansive sports fields, including a new $13 million soccer complex. The economic downturn has started to hurt Murfreesboro as it has other parts of the country. But college towns tend to ride out recessions better than most places since training is somewhat recession-proof. "We have a small town feel with big city amenities right here in our community being a city of 100,000 nation," said Rob Lyons, deputy incorporated town conductor for Murfreesboro.

Among the seven suggestions: Respond to e-mails not beyond 24 hours. And don’t exercise craft cards as cues to bombard new contacts with pitches

by dint of. Carmine Gallo

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Getting favorable word out put on a little budget is one of the never-failing challenges facing small-business owners. Advertising is often too expensive, so greatest number business owners rely on moral works old fashioned networking and word of mouth. However some are better at it than others (see BusinessWeek.com’s Smart Answers podcast, 4/18/07, "Instituting a Client Appreciation Program"). Here are seven rules that pleasure guarantee a strong first impression and a vigorous, lasting one.

Rule #1: Respond within 24 Hours

During the course of researching my next book, I came across an interesting trend. The people who hie the most felicitous companies are the utmost responsive. When I liberty a voice message or send an e-mail these individuals become back to me immediately through denunciation, whether they’re at the bureau or traveling. One woman who oversees 5,000 employees makes it a policy to respond to e-mail within 24 hours. She says her responsiveness provides a archetype for her employees. If she responds quickly to employee questions or concerns, they in turn understand the importance of getting back to customers in a short amount of time.

Even if you don’t have an instantaneous answer, acknowledge receiving every e-mail or voice message not more than 24 hours or in a less degree, and let the person know you’re considering the request or taking skirmish upon it.

Rule #2: Greet People with Enthusiasm

When a customer or employee calls and you choose to answer, it implies that you have time to talk. Far too many people continue to multitask during phone conversations. Those of us on the other end of the line can sense it, especially at the time that you give one-word answers to our questions and we hear typing in the background!

Give your customers and employees your full attention. Greet them like you’re sincerely excited to hear from them. And if the time isn’familiarily right, be professional enough to set a later time to give them your full attention.

Rule #3: Make Eye Contact

In conversations by customers or employees, look them in the eye. I know you power love your Blackberry, end please refrain from checking your device during the conversation. Think relative to how it makes you feel when the living body you’re talking to continually takes her eyes off you to check out other lower classes in the room. I’ll tell you in what manner I feel—like it’s a dissipate of time to even finish the conversation.

Give customers and employees your full attention. It makes people have the consciousness of being as though their opinions and insights are valued. It will help you make a commanding and durable imprinting.

Rule #4: Leave Smart Voice Messages

First of all, don’t leave long, rambling messages with your phone include at the end. Keep the script concise. Leave your name, time you called, and phone number at the beginning. Repeat the phone account at the end, s-l-o-w-l-y. There’s also nothing worse than a drawn finished intrepid of phone tag. It can’t hurt to leave a specific time when you can be reached. Of course, if you adieu a time, be there to rejoin the call!

Rule #5: Respect Contacts

A parley organizer recently told me attendees have started murmuring about counterpart participants who treat of business cards they have picked up at booths of the same kind with open invitations to cram in-boxes with solicitations. If someone gives you a card, it’s an invitation to begin a conversation. It isn’t permission to leave a constant bombardment of e-mail sales pitches under the guise of "newsletters." It’s also not an invitation to send 10-MB files that explain what your business does.

Rule #6: Mind Your E-Mail

Speaking of e-mail, keep your correspondence concise. Time is limited. Use a subject line with no more than three to five words that grab your reader’s attention. Give the pertinent information in the highest put into or two, and keep your correspondence to the same or two petulant paragraphs (unless of course a detailed note is expected). Also, don’t forget to employment proper punctuation and grammar. The spell-check office exists on your computer for a reason. Use it.

Rule #7: Remember Small Touches

When was the ultimate time you received a handwritten note? I bet you remember it. I do. After a brief conversation by the chief executive officer of a fully known franchisor, I was surprised to receive an coma in the mail with a short handwritten thank-you note lengthwise by several coupons for his issue. The coupons were with respect to small amounts, nevertheless the gesture left a big impression on me.

My insurance and financial planning director gets plenty of business from me on this account that of numerous, small touches during the year. Several times a year I can expect to receive a handwritten bill, a short voice message, or a copy of an article that I might find valuable given what he knows about my interests. None of these touches are accompanied by a hard take a bribe for, but I wouldn’t consider bringing my business to anyone otherwise.

Business is far too competitive to risk making a bad impression. But it’s not that hard to make a positive unit. Just think ready the way you same to be treated as a client. Follow these seven rules to stand apart.